Senator James Inhofe's Blog: the Greatest Hoax Perpetrated on the American People

Senator James Inhofe's Blog: the Greatest Hoax Perpetrated on the American People

Stop the presses! Senator James Inhofe's Environmental and Public Works (EPW) Committee press blog is breathlessly reporting (in big font, of course) that - wait for it - climate change is going to stop!

Today’s UK Telegraph reports: “Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said. Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a “lull” for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged…

Well, that's very interesting… but what's really interesting is the next paragraph, which Inhofe's blogger brigade conveniently missed:

However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.

And only several sentences later:

[One of the study's authors] stressed that the results were just the initial findings from a new computer model of how the oceans behave over decades and it would be wholly misleading to infer that global warming, in the sense of the enhanced greenhouse effect from increased carbon emissions, had gone away.

Either Inhofe's bloggers only see what they want to see, or their mouse buttons don't work very well, because if they'd looked at the other hits they got for their daily “global warming” Google news search, they would have found another article about the study, which explicitly says :

Climate experts have long warned, though, that warming is unlikely to be a gradual trend, but a movement in stops and starts.

[…]

The authors of the new study stress that they do not dispute the IPCC's figures. “Just to make things clear, we are not stating that anthropogenic [man-made] climate change won't be as bad as previously thought,” said Mojib Latif, a professor at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, northern Germany.

So, for Inhofe, his bloggers, and their pals in the deniosphere: hold your horses. You don't even have to “read the fine print”. Just read beyond the first paragraph or two of an article to see that science is not on your side, despite your desperate hopes.

And to the Heartland Institute and similar “think” tanks: please don't bother putting the authors of thenew study on your next “scientific” manifesto. They're not on your side, either.

Multiple climate models tell us warming is anthropogenic and going to continue. The inactivists shout that the models are unreliable for any or all of a hundred different reasons.

A single climate model gives us a preliminary result that “suggest[s] that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade”. The inactivists immediately proclaim that global warming stops.

So, do you trust models or don’t you? Is it too much to ask for consistency here?

You said:
A single climate model gives us a preliminary result that “suggest[s] that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade”.

Realists would never use a GCM as an indicator of anything but whimsical what if scenarios.
It is the actual measured reality that states imfatically that the warming has stopped, not some inaccurate model.

Troll, did you read the abstract of the study, conveniently linked by both the Telegraph piece and Page’s writeup here?

“Here we apply a simple approach—that uses only sea surface temperature (SST) observations—to partly overcome this difficulty and perform retrospective decadal predictions with a climate model….Using this method, and by considering both internal natural climate variations and projected future anthropogenic forcing, we make the following forecast:…”

They fed observations into a model (which is pretty much standard practice) and used it to produce a forecast. By your own admission, since this is “some inaccurate [climate] model” making the prediction, it is a “whimsical what if scenario” in your eyes – which doesn’t seem to stop you from taking it as proven observation.

I am beginning to think that you are doing this on purpose. Whatever the reason, you are emphatically linguistically challenged. But that aside, your posts are sounding more fantastical by the day. All of these claims that AGW is somehow losing credibility as a theory are what I find “whimsical.”

Sometimes, I just type too fast and it comes out “fonetically.”
Sometimes it is just fun to see what VJ will have to say about it.

As for AGW losing credibility, I don’t think there is any question of it.
The only debate on that point is around how fast it is happening.

The more people read and become informed, the faster it happens.
A recent poll actually measured the effect and reported it in an article tittled I believe: “the more you know about globalwarming the less worried you are about it”

Never have.
The models were never intended to be used as predictors.
They were merely intended to test specific components of a given theory. The modelers now admit this since GCMs as climate predictors have always failed miserably.

The UK Daily Telegraph is a right-wing, conversative newspaper, as I’m sure you know. It jumps on opportunities such as these to stir denialism and sensation.

Right now in the UK we have two problems with out media.

One, is that our editors and reporters are feeling that they story is ‘done to death’ and need a new angle. Marvellous, along comes this catchy headline from scientists who really need to think about what they are saying more carefully. Not in the factual science, but in how that science will be manipulated by the Telegraph and by Inhofe and his jackal pack.

Second, is that, as shown in a couple of studies, one just released by Boykoff and Mansfield and to be released by Neil Gavin, our right-wing and tabloid media are just not covering the issue, in quality or quantity, and when they do, they are getting the science wrong, or framing it in a way to encourage inaction.

Interestingly, I find that the inactivist blogocave is propagating Inhofe’s story with blinding efficiency, while totally failing to mention the groundbreaking work that’s the Heartland “500 scientists” list!

Here’s my plan: I’m going to ask Marohasy, Watts, etc. why they’re being silent on the Heartland 500. I’ll ask whether they’ve been intimidated by the Great Worldwide Bolshevist Inquisition into keeping quiet on Heartland’s list. I’ll ask whether they’re starting to sell out to the Treasonous Forces of the Left and Al Bore Gore.

If anyone would like to help me in this (after all, I’m just one person, and I’m not sure I know about all the inactivist blogs out there), or if anyone has better ideas, please feel free!

Okay, let’s pretend it’s not a La Nina year. That can be fun. Now let’s consider the obvious signs. Hmmm, would these include last autumn’s record Arctic sea ice melt? Or are you just writing a bunch of stupid stuff to live up to your username here?

Ummm. Do some research Steve.
Months ago NASA blamed wind patterns.
Now the “Consensus” is that soot, smog and haze is responsible.
Bottom line: Nobody has any idea really.
The only thing known for sure is that it has all happened before.
I even saw a mention of Warming Island on this site recently.
Well, like so many other myths spread by warmists, that one was shown to be false as well.
Warming Island is depicted on old maps of Greenland from long long ago.
And the Myth goes on…..

I wasn’t the one making some vague claim about things being obvious for over a year to anyone who could read. In some years wind does push multi-year ice out of the Arctic. And I’m sure soot contributes to melt. Were those things greater than usual last year in the Arctic? I appreciate urls when you try to explain things to me. When was it obvious to anyone who could read that AGW and Arctic ice melt weren’t related? I suspect the two are related, and most people who could read probably thought Arctic ice melt was an obvious sign of warming last September.
But you don’t seem to think Arctic sea ice melt says anything informative. What was so obvious more than a year ago?

The claim that warming will resume is the alarmists’ attempt to maintain their global warming fantasy in the face of a cooling world. It actually is possible for an oscillation of cold ocean surface water to mask global warming (where an active sun is raising the average temperature of the oceans), and it even happened a mere 60 years ago (between 1940 and 1960), but this is NOT what is happening now.

Instead, we have a very dangerous situation where the cooling effect of a fall off in solar activity is being compounded by cold Pacific and Atlantic oscillations. Warming effects incur negative feedbacks that make them self limiting. Not so with cooling effects, which regularly plunge the world into 100,000 year long ice ages, with the next one due any century now. We should be guarding against this very real danger by pumping out as much greenhouse gas as we can, tailored to patch the infrared “holes” in our greenhouse blanket. (Post at my link.)

And apparently you have a very poor understanding of how glaciations are initiated. What it takes is warm winters, which means more snow fall, and cool summers, which means that snow doesn’t melt.

The driver of glaciation is the Milankovic cycles, which govern the shape and attitude of earth’s orbit and rotation. There are three of them: orbital eccentricity, which has a nominal period of ~100,000 years; axial tilt, which has a nominal period of~ 41,000 years; and precession, or wobble of axis, which has a nominal period of ~23,000 years.

At first glance, the 1000,000 year period of earth’s orbital eccentricity seems a perfect match for the nominal ~100,000 year period of the glaciations of the past 1,000,000 years or so, but the ice core paleorecord tells us that the exact period and length of a glaciation and interglacial is not constant or even consistent. The timing and length varies by several even tens of thousands of years.

That’s because the amount of variation in solar insolation–the amount of solar energy falling onto the surface of earth–caused by earth’s eccentric orbit alone is not sufficient to initiate the onset or end of a glaciation. It takes the coincidence of two or all three of the cycles to determine when and how rapid and how severe the onset of a glaciation will be.

Because axial tilt determines how much insolation the poles receive in winter, it affects the strength of earth’s winter season. Counter-intuitively, less tilt produces a warmer polar winter, which yields higher polar snowfall, and thus promotes ice sheet growth.

Precession is the final kicker. It determines which pole faces toward the sun at earth’s closest and furthest points of its eccentric elliptical orbit. When earth’s northern hemisphere tilts away from the sun when earth is at its furthest point from the sun, then northern hemisphere winters will be most severe. Meanwhile, summer will occur at earth’s closest approach to the sum, making it much warmer.

At present eccentricity is almost at minimum, producing only a 6% difference in solar insolation between earth’s closest approach to the sun, or perihelion, in January and aphelion in July, out of a potential maximum difference of 20-30%. No danger of the next ice age from eccentricity any time soon.

Axial tilt is presently at 23.5° out of a range of 21.5° to 24.5°. No danger of semi-permanent warm polar winters for quite a while yet either.

As for precession, at present earth’s closest approach to the sun is near winter solstice, while aphelion is near the summer solstice, thus moderating northern hemisphere winters and summers. This should induce a warmer Arctic winter with more precipitation, but it’s being counteracted by the steep tilt of earth’s axis, which produces a colder Arctic winter.

If this current peak in precession coincided with the peak of one of the other two cycles, it would initiate a new glaciation. But it does not coincide, so it is not going to bring on a new glaciation. Based on the very predictable Milancovic cycles the next ice age isn’t due for another 10,000 to 15,000 years minumum, perhaps as much as 40,000 to 50,000 years.

In other words, we are fortunate to live in one of the longer lived interglacials. And that’s a very good thing.

But hey, never let the facts get in the way of a good global warming denial argument.

I am curious: clearly desmogblog does not agree with Inhofe. Why then do you link to his webpage and increase its traffic? Surely, if somebody is very interested, she can do a google search to find out whatever she wants about that site. This just seems needless publicity for something that you so deeply disagree with (the same point that you have made in this posting could be made by linking to the newspaper article, which you have).

If you check out “About Us” on the upper right you will see that this website is about examining dishonest PR tactics on global warming. So people who choose to can check out the bad guys’ websites for themselves, having been forewarned.

Reducing CO2 will not affect climate, but can put all life on earth in jeopardy. I prefer to leave fear to others, but the goal of reducing CO2 was pushed by exploiting people’s fears and lack of knowledge.

Everyone needs to know that reduction of levels has more serious implications. Current levels are 385 ppm. At 200 ppm plants begin to suffer and at 120 ppm they begin to die. Increasing the level has great benefits for all life. Research shows most plants function best between 1000 and 1200 ppm, Commercial greenhouses are pumping these amounts in and achieving four times better growth and yield with significantly less water use. This suggests plants evolved to that level and our now CO2 ‘starved’ with atmospheric levels of 385 ppm. By working to lower CO2 levels you are diminishing the growth potential of plants. At 200 ppm they begin to die. Plants grow more vigorously so all ecosystems expand and are healthier.

Note how even the most alarmist of the act-now people don’t expect us to reach even 350 ppm (and according to Joe Romm (climateprogress.org), while 450ppm is possible, it’ll take a LOT of effort), and that the historical “natural cycles” level is around 280ppm.

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.

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